The presentation segment (followed by Q&A in a separate video):
The webinar presentation (Q&A is in a separate episode that follows below):
Deondra Wardelle opened with a sentence that did most of the work for the rest of the session. "Wherever there are people and processes, there you can find the Kata. The Kata works."
The framing matters because it reframes what Toyota Kata actually is. The book is "Toyota Kata." The research was done at Toyota. The patterns Mike Rother documented were observed in a manufacturing organization. But the underlying practice — scientific thinking, deliberate experimentation, daily coaching toward a target condition — isn't manufacturing-specific. It's specific to human beings trying to learn their way through uncertainty toward something they care about. Which is to say, it's specific to most of what people are doing most of the time, in or out of factories.
Deondra spent the session walking through what the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata actually are, sharing reflections from the recently-completed KataCon 7 conference, and showing how she's been applying Kata in contexts that have nothing to do with manufacturing — including her work to dismantle structural racism through what she calls an anti-racism strength-training center. The session was both a primer for the Kata-curious in the audience (which polling at the start showed was 48 percent of attendees) and a working example of what evolved Kata practice looks like in someone who has been at it for years.
Deondra R. Wardelle is the owner of On To The Next One Consulting, LLC. She is a visionary leader, problem solver, organizer, and motivational speaker whose specialty is empowering and developing individuals and groups toward achieving their personal and professional goals. She also coaches individuals and organizations in achieving and sustaining transformational change.
Her professional background spans Continuous Improvement leadership at scale. She is a former Chief Strategy Officer at the American College of Sports Medicine and former Director of Performance Excellence for a global leader in the paper and packaging industry, where she and her team led Continuous Improvement projects across more than 70 facilities in North America, Europe, and Asia. She has also worked as a corporate trainer, project manager, banking manager, and in various operations management roles.
Deondra is a graduate of Western Kentucky University with a Bachelor of Arts in Corporate and Organizational Communications. She has pursued Leadership Studies at the Louisville Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and earned her Health Coach certification from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition.
Her current passion project is the #RootCauseRacism movement, a global initiative to end systemic racism and social injustice. She has been a recurring moderator and panelist for the KaiNexus webinar series in connection with that work.
Deondra started with a definition because the word itself confuses people. Kata isn't an acronym. The word is Japanese — a suffix meaning "way of doing." Kata are a way of learning fundamental skills that you can then build on. The practice is structured, repeatable, and meant for consistent daily engagement. When the Kata is paired with scientific thinking, the result is the development of skills through small, frequent experiments — not through bursts of training followed by long stretches of no practice.
She showed an image of two young girls in roughly the 8-to-11 age range, clearly thrilled by an experiment they had just completed. That image, she said, is what Kata represents to her. The thrill of scientific thinking and doing. The deliberate engagement with reality with the intent of learning. You have a hypothesis. You run a test. You see what actually happens. You reflect. You decide what to test next.
The word "Kata" also comes from martial arts, where it refers to the fundamental moves combatants train on. Deondra used the example from "The Karate Kid" — Mr. Miyagi teaching the young man to wax on, wax off, paint the fence, mop the floor. The repeated motions seemed unrelated to fighting. But when the fight came, the embedded patterns became reflexes. The fence-painting motion became a block. The waxing motion became a block. The daily practice produced the capability that the competition demanded, without the trainee ever consciously knowing that was what was happening.
The principle applies wherever someone is trying to develop a habit, build a skill, or learn their way through something they don't yet know how to do. Martial arts. Personal improvement. Business. Community organizing. The mechanism is the same.
Deondra walked through the four-step Improvement Kata model from Mike Rother's book.
She quoted Taiichi Ohno, the inventor of the Toyota Production System: "Toyota style is not to create results by working hard. It is a system that says there is no limit to people's creativity. People don't go to Toyota to work — they go there to think." The quote frames what the Kata is for. Not results-by-effort. Capability-by-thinking, with the results following.
The four steps cascade from a long-range vision down to daily experiments.
Step one: understand the direction or challenge. This is the why. In professional settings, it's the vision the organization is in business to pursue. In personal settings, it's what gets you out of bed in the morning regardless of weather. The challenge is where strategy and execution meet. Deondra used the phrasing from the Kata book: "Wouldn't it be great?" The challenge is the answer to that question on a horizon of roughly six months to three years. Not a daily goal. Not an annual target. A meaningful aspiration that aligns with the vision and pulls the work forward.
Step two: grasp the current condition. This is the discipline of going to see. In Lean terminology, the gemba — the actual place where value is created. In a factory, the production line. In an office, where the work actually happens. In a hair salon, the seat where someone gets their hair cut. Wherever the value is being created. The discipline at this step is to observe without judgment. Not "we're here, but we should be over there." Just: what is the current condition? How is the process actually functioning? The temptation to jump straight from current condition to solutions is the trap. Step two is observation, not diagnosis.
Step three: establish the next target condition. The "wouldn't it be great" is far out. The target condition is the next small step toward it. For a new learner on their first storyboard, the target condition might be a week out. Deondra credited her first coach, Tracy Defoe, with the patience to keep pulling her back from the temptation to leap straight from current condition to wouldn't-it-be-great. Tracy made the target conditions manageable so Deondra could actually learn the steps. The discipline of scaling the target to something achievable in the near term is what makes the Kata work as a practice rather than as a wish.
Step four: experiment toward the target condition. This is where the PDCA cycles live. You look at the obstacles between current condition and target condition. You identify the first obstacle to address. You form a hypothesis. You run an experiment. You see what happens. You reflect. The line between current condition and target condition in the model is deliberately drawn jagged — not as a straight path. You make progress. You make less progress than expected. You sometimes feel like you're going backwards. You learn at every step. The jagged line is honest about what real learning looks like.
The four steps aren't a one-time sequence. They're a continuous cycle. You reach the target condition, set the next target condition, and start again. Over time, you close the gap between where you started and your wouldn't-it-be-great.
The second half of the Kata practice is the Coaching Kata. The Improvement Kata is what the learner does. The Coaching Kata is what the coach does.
Deondra shared an image from her first KataCon — KataCon 3 in San Diego, four years before this webinar. She was pictured with Mike Rother and with the person who became her first coach, Tracy Defoe. Deondra hadn't known Tracy before the conference. During the session, Michael Lombard shared the fifth Kata code: have a coach, be a coach. Deondra didn't have a coach. She turned to Tracy and asked. Tracy said yes. The rest, as Deondra put it, is history.
The Coaching Kata works in pairs and triads. The learner has a storyboard and is working toward a target condition. The coach asks questions to develop the learner's thinking. The coach doesn't tell the learner what to do. The coach asks the five coaching questions — the questions every Kata coach carries on a card and doesn't leave home without — and works with the learner over time to internalize the scientific thinking pattern. The second coach observes the coaching cycles, gives feedback to the primary coach, and helps the primary coach get better at the practice of coaching itself.
The structure is intentional. The coach is responsible for the learner's results. The coach is also responsible for developing the learner's capability over time, not just for hitting the current target condition. The second coach makes the practice of coaching itself a learnable skill rather than something you're just supposed to know how to do.
Deondra spent time on what's called the Kata code, and particularly on Kata code number four: beginners practice the Kata exactly.
The point is foundational. New learners and new coaches should follow the four steps. They should ask the five questions. They shouldn't skip steps. They shouldn't improvise. The reason isn't bureaucratic. It's developmental. The starter Kata builds the underlying habit. Once the scientific thinking pattern is embedded, the practitioner can build on it, evolve it, and make the practice their own. But the embedding has to happen first. Skipping the discipline of practicing exactly means the underlying habits never form, which means the evolution that follows has nothing to stand on.
Deondra ran a poll mid-presentation. The question: can you build on the starter Kata and evolve your own approach? Most of the audience (77 percent) said true. Some (23 percent) said false. The answer was true — with the qualification that "build on" means starting from embedded fundamentals, not skipping them. Toyota itself encourages practitioners to evolve. The reason the practice is called "starter" Kata is precisely that it's a starting point. But the starting point is non-negotiable. You can't develop your own classical music without learning the scale first.
She extended the analogy. Someone learning piano has to learn the scale before they can compose. The scale isn't the destination. It's the foundation that makes the destination possible. The same applies to Kata. The four steps and five questions are the scale. The evolved practice that emerges over time is the music.
KataCon 7 had wrapped the week before the webinar, and Deondra had originally prepared around 60 slides on it before paring back. She walked through three highlights.
Gemma Jones presented on what she calls Kata microlearning — the practice of capturing a tiny burst of new knowledge after every coaching cycle. The five coaching questions already include a reflection on what was learned. Microlearning takes that reflection and makes it explicit and durable. You write down what you learned. You build a record over time.
The shift sounds small. The effect, Deondra said, was substantial. She'd started capturing her microlearnings in a book at the start of KataCon 7, and by the end of the conference she was three-quarters of the way through the book. The deeper reflection forced by writing the microlearning produced more learning per cycle, and accumulated learning across cycles in a way that's visible going back through the book. Gemma's website, sparkimprovement.co.uk, hosts a version of the Kata coaching record that includes a section for capturing microlearnings, and Deondra credited Gemma directly for what she called a game-changing addition to her practice.
Tracy Defoe presented "Out of the Shadows: The Toyota Kata Future" in a futuristic format — as if she were presenting at KataCon 27, twenty years in the future. Deondra noted with appreciation that those who practice the Improvement Kata tend to be creative people, which Tracy's framing demonstrated.
Tracy laid out four points for the future of Kata.
Have a coach, be a coach. Don't go it alone. And take it to the next level. Tracy's challenge: coach somebody at no cost, the way she had coached Deondra. Deondra noted that she would never be able to repay Tracy for the gift of that initial coaching. The way to honor it is to extend the same gift forward to someone else.
Connect locally in your region. Bring your community together. Run Kata in the Classroom simulations virtually. Participate in a Kata Practitioner Day. The point is that the practice spreads through local connection more reliably than through any centralized broadcast.
Connect globally. Tweet @aKataschool to engage with speakers and other practitioners. Attend virtual conferences like the upcoming KataCon Europe. The global Kata community is unusually generous and open, and engaging with it accelerates everyone's practice.
Share. Be generous, kind, and caring with fellow learners. Especially as a coach. Be patient. Don't give away answers. Ask questions. The point of the practice is the development of the learner, not the demonstration of the coach's expertise.
Tilo Schwarz did the closing summary for KataCon 7 and captured the conference's theme in a single line: "Think scientifically about the world and view people with the heart."
Deondra called Tilo a coach's coach. He has been developing a starter Coaching Kata that takes both scientific thinking and the encouragement of the heart into consideration. The premise is that great coaching isn't just about asking the right questions — it's about asking them in a way that supports the human being doing the work. The mind and the heart aren't separate skills. They're integrated capabilities, and the practice that produces both can be made explicit and teachable.
Tilo runs KataDojo workshops periodically — small-group immersive sessions for coaches who want to improve their coaching. Deondra has participated in those sessions and called them life-changing for a coach. The mention came with a recommendation for any audience member who has used Kata personally and wants to take their coaching to the next level.
The most concrete part of the session came when Deondra walked through where she's been applying Kata in her own life. The list went well beyond what most CI practitioners would consider a typical application.
She introduced Kata in her sorority, where it helped with strategic planning and personal goal-setting through strategic vision boards. She worked with the Light of the World Christian Church in Indianapolis, applying Kata to leadership development and leadership training. She introduced Kata to nonprofit boards she serves on, including one focused on community service. She's on the advisory board for NOW Courier, a local transportation company, where Kata informs how they think about their work. She uses Kata in human resources processes — specifically the performance management review process. She applies it to strategic planning in organizations where she works and volunteers.
And — the application that anchors her current focus — she uses the Improvement Kata in the #RootCauseRacism movement. Dismantling structural racism is, in Improvement Kata terms, a wouldn't-it-be-great of substantial scope. Working toward it through small experiments, target conditions, and reflective cycles is what the Kata is for.
The summary point Deondra made: wherever there are people and processes, the Kata works. The breadth of her own application list is the evidence.
She referenced a tweet from Mike Rother at the close of KataCon 7: "KataCon 7 is ending. How cool is it to research and write up something like Toyota Kata and then see people messing with it and developing it further? Glad we call them starter Kata so there is room for everyone. Run with it, change the world, get famous, whatever you like."
Other examples Deondra mentioned: Michael Caston using Kata in construction to ensure safe working environments and quality builds. The US Environmental Protection Agency using Kata in environmental justice work to protect human health and the environment. Kata in golf practice. Kata in the work to address systemic racism.
The Kata works wherever it gets practiced. The practitioners decide where it gets practiced.
Deondra closed the substantive part of her presentation by describing where her own evolved Kata practice is currently pointing.
Her observation about the corporate response to George Floyd's and Breonna Taylor's murders in the summer of 2020: many organizations made statements. Many individuals and organizations took some action to increase awareness of racial inequities. Awareness was useful. Awareness was also not enough.
Awareness, Deondra argued, won't overcome decades of socialization that have produced collective unconscious bias. Awareness is necessary but not sufficient. The next step requires practice and skill development — the same logic that applies to any other capability that has to be embedded rather than merely understood.
The anti-racism strength-training center she's been developing applies that logic. New thoughts, new beliefs, and new behaviors take motivation, practice, reflection, and action — exactly the elements the Improvement Kata is built around. The Kata becomes the framework for developing the capability to think and act differently about race over time, with experiments and target conditions scaled to what individuals and organizations can actually do in their daily work.
The framing matters because it locates anti-racism work as a skill-development practice rather than as a series of one-time events. The center isn't passive education. It's structured practice. The Kata makes that practice operational in a way that workshops and statements can't.
Deondra invited interested attendees to visit her website to learn more and complete a contact form to discuss a needs assessment. The work was at an early stage at the time of the webinar but represented a working example of what the evolved-practice principle she described earlier in the session actually looks like applied to a substantial real-world challenge.
The Kata practice Deondra walked through is fundamentally about human development through deliberate daily engagement. The Improvement Kata builds scientific thinking. The Coaching Kata builds coaching capability. The micro-cycles of PDCA accumulate into skill over time. None of that is software. All of it depends on humans showing up to do the work day after day.
Where infrastructure connects is in the artifacts the practice produces and the spread the practice enables.
The storyboard is the central artifact of the Improvement Kata. The learner's challenge, current condition, target condition, obstacles, and experiments live there. The coach interacts with the storyboard during coaching cycles. The microlearnings Gemma Jones introduced get captured somewhere. For an individual practitioner, a physical wall or a whiteboard can be the storyboard. For an organization with many learners and many coaches, the storyboards have to live somewhere visible, searchable, and persistent. Digital infrastructure that holds storyboards across an organization — alongside the project work, the idea systems, and the strategic priorities — is what makes the practice work at scale rather than as scattered individual habits.
The coaching cycles benefit from the same infrastructure. A coach working with one learner can hold the relationship in their head and on the storyboard. A second coach observing multiple coaches needs visibility across coaching relationships. An organization trying to develop coaching capability across many people needs a way to see how coaching practice is distributing and developing over time. Without visibility, the coaching pyramid collapses back into a few skilled coaches working with whoever happens to be near them.
The spread Deondra emphasized — Kata in classrooms, in nonprofits, in construction, in environmental justice work, in dismantling structural racism — depends on practitioners being able to find each other, learn from each other, and adapt each other's evolved practices. The Kata community Deondra described works because of the generosity Tracy Defoe modeled when she said yes to coaching Deondra at no cost. It also works because the community has built ways to make practice visible across geographic and organizational distance — KataCon, the Kata Girl Geeks group, the Kata Schools network. Within an organization, the same principle applies. A practitioner experimenting with a creative application of Kata in one part of the organization should be visible to practitioners elsewhere who could learn from or adapt that application. Infrastructure that makes the practice visible across the organization supports the spread that the community model demonstrates externally.
None of this changes what Deondra was teaching. The four steps are the four steps. The five coaching questions are the questions. The discipline of practicing exactly while beginning, then evolving once the fundamentals are embedded, is the discipline. The generosity of the Kata community is the generosity. What infrastructure does is preserve the practice across the time and distance that the work has to operate over, and make the cumulative learning visible to people who weren't directly involved in producing it but could benefit from it.
What is the Toyota Kata? A practice for developing scientific thinking habits through deliberate daily engagement, articulated in Mike Rother's book of the same name. The book describes two integrated Katas — the Improvement Kata (what the learner does) and the Coaching Kata (what the coach does) — that together produce both better operational results and the capability to keep producing better results over time. The word "Kata" is Japanese, meaning "way of doing." It comes from martial arts, where katas are the fundamental moves practitioners drill until the moves become reflexive.
What are the four steps of the Improvement Kata? Understand the direction or challenge (the long-range "wouldn't it be great" aligned with the organizational or personal vision). Grasp the current condition (go to gemba, observe without judgment). Establish the next target condition (a smaller, near-term step on the way to the challenge). Experiment toward the target condition (run PDCA cycles against the obstacles between current and target). The four steps cycle continuously. Each target condition reached becomes the foundation for the next one.
What is the Coaching Kata? The structured practice the coach uses while supporting a learner working through the Improvement Kata. The coach asks the five coaching questions — questions written on a card most Kata coaches carry — that guide the learner through the scientific thinking pattern without giving away answers. The coach's role is to develop the learner's capability, not to solve the learner's problem. A second coach often observes the coaching cycles to help the primary coach develop coaching skill over time.
Why does Deondra say "wherever there are people and processes, you can find the Kata"? Because the underlying practice — scientific thinking, deliberate experimentation, daily coaching toward a target condition — isn't manufacturing-specific. It's specific to human beings trying to learn their way through uncertainty toward something they care about. Manufacturing happens to be where the practice was most thoroughly studied by Mike Rother, but the practice itself works in any context where people are trying to develop a capability or improve a process. Deondra's own application list — sororities, churches, nonprofit boards, HR processes, anti-racism work — is the evidence.
What does it mean to "practice the Kata exactly"? For beginners, it means following the four steps without skipping any of them and asking the five coaching questions without improvising. The discipline isn't bureaucratic. It's developmental. The starter Kata builds the underlying habits of scientific thinking. Once those habits are embedded, the practitioner can build on them and evolve their own approach. But the embedding has to happen first. Skipping the foundation means the evolution that follows has nothing to stand on. As Deondra used the analogy: you can't compose your own classical music without first learning the scale.
What was Gemma Jones's contribution to the practice? Kata microlearning — the practice of capturing a tiny burst of new knowledge after every coaching cycle. The five coaching questions already include a reflection on what the learner learned. Microlearning makes that reflection explicit, durable, and reviewable. Practitioners build a written record of their learning over time. Deondra had nearly filled an entire notebook with microlearnings just during KataCon 7. Gemma's website at sparkimprovement.co.uk hosts a version of the Kata coaching record that includes a section for capturing microlearnings.
What was Tracy Defoe's four-point framework for the future of Kata? Have a coach, be a coach, and don't go it alone. Take it to the next level by coaching someone at no cost. Connect locally in your region — bring your community together, run Kata in the Classroom simulations, participate in Kata Practitioner Days. Connect globally — engage with the worldwide Kata community through events like KataCon Europe. Share — be generous, kind, and caring with fellow learners and the people you coach. The four points define what the next stage of Kata practice looks like for someone who has internalized the basics.
What was Tilo Schwarz's contribution to KataCon 7? The closing line: "Think scientifically about the world and view people with the heart." Tilo, whom Deondra called a coach's coach, has been developing a starter Coaching Kata that integrates scientific thinking with attention to the human being being coached. The premise is that great coaching is both rigorous and humane, and that those two qualities can be developed together through structured practice. Tilo's KataDojo workshops offer immersive practice for coaches who want to improve their coaching capability.
What is the #RootCauseRacism movement? A global initiative Deondra founded to end systemic racism and social injustice. The movement uses continuous improvement methods, including the Improvement Kata, to develop the capability to address structural racism over time. The premise is that awareness alone won't overcome decades of socialization, and that systemic change requires the same kind of deliberate practice and skill development that any other capability requires. Deondra is currently developing what she calls an anti-racism strength-training center — a virtual environment that uses motivation, practice, reflection, and action to support new thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors over time.
What kinds of organizations and contexts has Deondra applied the Kata to? Her sorority for strategic planning and personal goal-setting through vision boards. The Light of the World Christian Church in Indianapolis for leadership development and training. Nonprofit boards she serves on. The advisory board of NOW Courier, a local transportation company. Human resources processes, specifically the performance management review process. Organizational strategic planning. And the #RootCauseRacism movement. The breadth of the list is the demonstration of the principle that the Kata works wherever there are people and processes.
Why is "have a coach, be a coach" central to the practice? Because the practice doesn't fully embed without a coach providing the structure and the feedback. A practitioner working alone can read the book and try to follow the four steps, but the daily coaching cycle is where the scientific thinking pattern actually gets developed as a habit. Deondra became a coach because her first coach — Tracy Defoe — said yes to her at KataCon 3, at no cost. The generosity of the community is the mechanism by which the practice spreads. Saying yes to coaching someone else, especially at no cost, extends the gift forward.
How does someone get started with Kata if they're Kata-curious? Read Mike Rother's "Toyota Kata" book. Watch sessions like this one and others from the Kata community. Connect with practitioners on LinkedIn and Twitter — the global community is unusually generous and open to new learners. Attend events like KataCon (annual in the US) and KataCon Europe. Visit kataschool.org to learn about Kata Schools and find local resources. If you have someone in your environment who is already practicing, ask them to coach you. If you don't, the Kata Girl Geeks community at katagirlgeeks.com is one entry point. The practice starts with one storyboard, one coach, and the willingness to practice the starter Kata exactly while you build the underlying habit.
Is Kata software? No. Kata is a practice. Software can support the practice — by holding storyboards, by tracking coaching cycles, by making the practice visible across an organization — but the practice itself is human. The four steps are something a person does. The five coaching questions are something a person asks. The microlearnings are something a person reflects on and writes down. Infrastructure helps the practice scale and persist, but the practice doesn't exist without the people doing it daily.
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